1931 speech Stalin warned that the USSR only had ten years in which to prepare against invasion (and he was right). A 1950 propaganda poster urging farmers to fulfill the Five-Year Plan. The slogan reads, “Let us give to the country 127 million tons of grain per year.” © HULTON ARCHIVE
FLORENCE, COUNCIL OF
The First Five-Year Plan was cut short as planning gave way to confusion. A Second Five-Year Plan was issued in one volume in 1934, already behind schedule. The planners were learning that one-year plans were more effective for managing the economy, leaving the five-year plans to serve as propaganda documents, especially effective abroad where the Great Depression seemed to signal the collapse of capitalism.
The Third Five-Year Plan had limited circulation, and the Fourth was only a pamphlet, issued as a special edition of the party newspaper, Pravda.
The Nazi invasion, starting June 22, 1941, required hasty improvisation, using previously prepared central and eastern bases to replace those quickly overrun by well-equipped German forces. The Nazis almost captured Moscow in December 1941.
After Soviet forces rallied, wartime planners organized hasty output increases, drawing on newly trained survivors of Stalin’s drastic purges. Russian planners worked uneasily with U.S. and British officials as the long- delayed second front was opened, and abundant Lend-Lease supplies arrived.
After the war, improvisation gave way to Stalin’s grim 1946 Five-Year Plan, which held the Soviet people to semi-starvation rations while he rebuilt heavy industry and challenged the United States in building an atomic bomb.
Fortunately for the Soviet people and the world, Stalin died in March 1953, and by 1957 Nikita Khrushchev was able to give Soviet planners a more humane agenda. The next Five-Year Plan was actually a seven-year plan with ambitious targets for higher living standards. Soviet welfare did improve markedly. However, Khrushchev was diverted by his efforts to control Berlin and by his ill-fated Cuban missile adventure. The Party leadership was furious, but instead of having him executed, they allowed him to retire.
This brilliant leader’s successors were a dull lot. The planners returned to previous five-year plan procedures, which mainly cranked up previous targets by applying a range of percentage increases. Growth rates steadily declined.
In 1985 the energetic Mikhail Gorbachev looked for help from Soviet planners, but the planners were outweighed by the great bureaucracies running the system. In a final spasm, the last Five-Year Plan set overambitious targets like those of the first such endeavor. Other Russians contributed greatly by creating new tools for economic management, especially Leonid Kontorovich, who invented linear programming; Wassily Leontief, who invented input-output analysis; and Tigran Khachaturov, who provided skillful political protection for several hundred talented economists as they improved Russian economics. These men rose above the barriers of the Russian planning system and thus deserve worldwide respect. See also: ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (1990). Soviet Economic Structure and Performance, 4th ed. New York: Harper amp; Row. Hunter, Holland, and Szyrmer, Janusz M. (1992). Faulty Foundations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
In 1438 Pope Eugenius IV called a church council to consider reunion of the eastern and western churches. The Latin and Greek churches had been drifting apart for centuries and from the year 1054 onward had rarely been in communion with each other. The sack of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople by the western crusaders made it clear that they no longer considered the Greeks their coreligionists and proved to the Greeks of Byzantium that the Latins were not their brothers in faith. But by the fifteenth century, with the Ottoman Turks already in control of most of the territory of the Byzantine Empire and moving on its capital of Constantinople, reunion of the churches seemed to be a necessity if the Christian world were to respond with a united front to the Muslim threat to Europe.
The council convened in 1439 in the Italian city of Ferrara and then moved to Florence. Present were not only the Pope, the cardinals, and many western bishops and theologians, but also the Byzantine Emperor John VIII, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II, the foremost cleric of the eastern
FOLKLORE
Christian world, and a number of leading officials and clergy of the Byzantine world (including a Russian delegation). The main points of dispute between the two churches were the legitimacy of a western addition to the creed (the “filioque”) and the nature of the church: whether it should be ruled by the Pope or by all the bishops jointly. After much discussion and debate, the delegates of the eastern church, under political pressure, accepted the western positions on the “filioque” and Papal supremacy, and reunion of the churches was solemnly proclaimed.
When the Greek representatives returned home, however, their decision was greeted with derision. Church union was never accepted by the masses of the Eastern Christian faithful. In any case, it became a dead letter with the 1453 Turkish conquest of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul by the Turks. When the Greek Isidore, Metropolitan of Kiev and presiding bishop of the Russian church, returned to Moscow where he normally resided and proclaimed the Pope as the head of the church, he was arrested on the orders of Grand Prince Basil II (“The Dark”) and then diplomatically allowed to escape to Poland. In 1448 he was replaced as metropolitan by a Russian bishop, Jonah, without the consent of the mother church in Constantinople, which was deemed to have given up its faith by submitting to the Pope. From now on, the church of Russia would be an independent (autocephalous) Orthodox church.
The ramifications of the Council of Florence were significant. The rejection of its decisions in the East made it clear that the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches were to be separate institutions, as they are today. Yet the concept of incorporating eastern ritual into Catholicism in certain places, a compromise that evolved at the council, became the model for the so-called uniate church created in Polish-governed Ukraine and Belarus in 1596, whereby the Orthodox church in those lands became part of the Catholic church while retaining its traditional eastern rites. See also: BASIL II; METROPOLITAN; UNIATE CHURCH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cherniavsky, Michael M. (1955). “The Reception of the Council of Florence in Moscow.” Church History 24:347-359. Gill, Joseph. (1961). The Council of Florence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Folklore has played a vital role in the lives of the Russian people and has exerted a considerable influence on the literature, music, dance, and other arts of Russia, including such major nineteenth-and twentieth-century writers and composers as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Peter Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky.
A folklore tradition has existed and flourished in Russia for many centuries, has been collected and studied for well more than two hundred years, and is represented by a variety of large and small genres, including oral epic songs, folktales, laments, ritual and lyric songs, incantations, riddles, and proverbs.
A simple explanation for the survival of folklore over such a long period of time is difficult to find. Some possible reasons can be found in the fact that the population was predominately rural and unable to read and write prior to the Soviet era; that the secular, nonspiritual literature of the folklore tradition was for the most part a primary source of entertainment for Russians from all classes and levels of society; or that the Orthodox Church was unsuccessful in its efforts to repress the Russian peasant’s pagan, pre-Christian folk beliefs and rituals, which over time had absorbed many Christian elements, a phenomenon commonly referred to as “double belief.” The fact that the Russian peasant was both geographically and culturally far removed from urban centers and events that influenced the country’s development and direction also played a role in folklore’s survival. And Russia’s
